New election data highlights the ongoing impact of 2011 GOP redistricting in Wisconsin

Voters walk out of a polling site in Milwaukee County during a Democratic primary in August 2018.(Photo: Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Detailed election data posted by the state this week illustrates once more the ongoing impact of Wisconsin’s gerrymandered, Republican-friendly legislative map.

GOP Gov. Scott Walker lost his bid for re-election by roughly 1 percentage point Nov. 6 to Democrat Tony Evers.

Yet Walker carried 63 of the state’s 99 state Assembly districts.

In fact, the data show that 64 of the 99 districts are more Republican than the state as a whole, based on their vote for governor.

In other words, Republicans enjoy a built-in 64-35 advantage in the partisan makeup of the 99 Assembly districts. In a hypothetical 50-50 election, in which there are equal numbers of Democratic and Republican voters in Wisconsin, no one crosses party lines and independents split down the middle, that translates into a massive 29-seat GOP advantage in the Assembly. That's very close to the 27-seat margin (63-36) that Republicans won last month.

Every election since the current map was drawn has told the same story:

Republicans enjoy a natural edge in the battle for the Legislature because Democratic voters are more concentrated geographically in urban areas, especially in Milwaukee and Madison, meaning their voting power is confined to a smaller number of districts.

The legislative map drawn by the GOP in 2011 added greatly to that natural Republican advantage. Under the old map, Democrats had to outperform the GOP by 2 or 3 points statewide to have a good shot at winning control of the Assembly. But under the current map, Democrats need to out-perform the GOP by closer to 9 or 10 points statewide to have a good shot at winning an Assembly majority.

Aside from locking in Republican control, the gerrymandered map has almost killed off competitive Assembly elections. To maximize their partisan advantage, Republicans drew a minority of hugely lopsided Democratic districts (minimizing the impact of the Democratic vote) and a sizable majority of less lopsided but safe GOP seats. That leaves hardly any truly “purple” Assembly districts in this “purple” state. In the Nov. 6 election, only five of 99 Assembly races were decided by less than 5 points. Only two were decided by less than 3 points.

Exactly how tilted is the current map?

One way to gauge this is to look at the results for governor or president by legislative district. That tells you how Republican and Democratic voters are distributed across districts and how many districts favor each party in their underlying partisan makeup.

The 2018 numbers below are based on the ward-level election returns posted by the state this week. John Johnson, a research fellow at Marquette University Law School who works with Marquette pollster Charles Franklin, used those returns to calculate the vote for governor in every Assembly district and shared his data for this analysis.

I’ve also done the same analysis for the past seven Wisconsin elections, using the district-by-district results for governor or president to measure the partisan tilt of the state’s legislative map.

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Wisconsin's tilted map

The numbers all show that the current map is far more tilted toward the GOP than the previous map — and all but ensures Republican control of the state Assembly in “good” years or “bad” for the GOP.

Let’s start with the 2010 race for governor, which was conducted under the old map. Walker won statewide by just under 6 points. Based on how they voted for governor, 56 of the 99 Assembly districts were more Republican than the state as a whole (meaning Walker did better in those places than he did statewide).

That meant the GOP had a built-in advantage under the old map of 13 seats (56 seats were more Republican than average, 43 were more Democratic).

Then Republicans redrew the lines in 2011 and that advantage grew dramatically. In the first midterm elections under the new map (2014), 62 seats were more Republican than the state as a whole based on how they voted for governor. A baked-in 13-seat GOP advantage (56-43) became a baked-in 25-seat edge (62-37).

Even that doesn’t tell the whole story, because not only did Republicans increase the number of GOP-leaning seats, they increased their partisan advantage in those individual seats. In order to win 50 seats under the old map, Democrats had to win at least seven seats that had a GOP lean. But those seven seats were fairly competitive, with a Republican lean of 0 to 3 points.

The math got far worse for Democrats under the new map. The 2014 results showed that to get a bare 50-seat majority, Democrats needed to win at least 13 seats with a Republican lean, including five seats with a GOP lean of more than 8 points.

The 2018 elections results tell a similar story. Of the 99 Assembly seats, 64 were more Republican in their vote for governor than the state as whole. Walker carried 63 of them despite losing statewide.

To win a bare majority of 50 seats, Democrats would have needed to win at least 14 seats that Walker carried, including nine he carried by more than 5 points. In an era of diminished ticket-splitting, that wasn’t remotely going to happen. Republican Assembly candidates won all but two of the 63 districts carried by Walker. And Democratic Assembly candidates won all by two of the 36 Assembly districts carried by Evers.

Democrats had no prayer in Assembly

In short, in a year when Democrats swept the statewide elections, they had no prayer of winning the state Assembly.

So how many Assembly seats would Democrats have won in 2018 with a “fair” map?

As critics of the map have pointed out, Democrats won 53% of all the Assembly votes cast statewide while coming away with only 36% of the seats. But it would be wrong to suggest Democrats should have won 53% of the Assembly seats under a fair map. The GOP didn’t bother to field candidates against 30 Democrats in ultra-blue Assembly districts, so using the statewide Assembly vote as a measure of how many seats Democrats “should have” won is misleading.

It would also be a stretch to suggest Democrats should have won an Assembly majority at all this year, even though their candidate for governor, Tony Evers, won just over 50% of the two-party vote.

Urban-rural divide

That’s because under even an unbiased map, the concentration of Democratic voters in urban areas is going to limit Democrats’ voting power across 99 Assembly districts. This has become an even bigger problem for Democrats because the party has lost ground in rural areas in recent years. Democrats are destined under these circumstances to underperform their statewide vote when it comes to how many Assembly seats they win.

But if a growing urban-rural divide has made it a challenge for Democrats to compete for Assembly control, any fair reading of the numbers shows that the gerrymandered GOP map has tilted the playing field a great deal more. That map has given Republicans a grip on the Legislature that is entirely disproportionate to the party’s level of popular support in the state and no doubt emboldened the party when it moved this week to diminish the powers of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general.

The victory of Evers Nov. 6 means that the next legislative map (in place for the 2022 elections) will likely be less partisan than the current one because it will be the product of divided government.

But since 2011, that map has effectively locked in large GOP majorities, even in an election year like 2012, when Democrats carried Wisconsin for president by 7 points. These majorities are utterly predictable when more than 60% of the Assembly seats are more Republican than the state as a whole.

The dominant grip Republicans retained in the Assembly Nov. 6 despite the narrow defeat of a Republican governor was exactly what was expected in a competitive election year — based purely on how the districts were drawn in 2011.